I did a 2D reconstruction on a really interesting historical case with Kane County Coroner’s Office in Illinois. The case started in 1979 when a homeowner in Batavia (Kane County) was doing some renovations and pulled out the baseboard in a wall. A part of a mandible fell out from the wall and the homeowner called the police. Together they knocked down more of the wall and discovered a cranium. PD gave the bones to legendary forensic anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow to examine, and he advised they were likely a white female 16 to 18 years of age. He believed this to be a historical case due to the dentition and the articles of clothing found in the walls with the remains. The case went cold until 2021, when the local Batavia Historical Society found the cranium in a box in their closet. They called PD again who took custody of the cranium once more. The coroner’s office took a sample of the cranium and Othram Labs was able to obtain a good enough sample to get a DNA profile. They did genetic genealogy and identified the victim as Esther Granger who died in 1866 in Merrillville Indiana, eighty miles from Batavia.
The mystery is how did Esther’s skull end up in a house eighty miles from where she lived and died? The house was in existence during her lifetime, but not associated with her family in any way. There was a local medical school that was shut down for grave robbing a few years after Esther’s death, so the coroner’s office theorizes her grave may have been robbed for the medical school’s use.
The coroner surmised Esther died in childbirth, as her death date was one day after the birth date of her last child, also named Esther.
This was a cool case to draw. I didn’t have any part of the mandible, only the cranium which was somewhat incomplete. The coroner’s office supplied many photos of the cranium in different views as well as photos of Esther’s granddaughter and case reports. The historical society supplied photos of hairstyles and clothing worn by ladies in that time period in that area.
Esther had fairly robust lateral supraorbital rims, leading to triangular eyebrows and lateral eyelid folds. Her granddaughter shares this trait. Her piriform aperture was fairly wide and somewhat uneven. Her zygomatic bones were not symmetrical, the one on the right being higher and wider than the left. Neither mastoid process was present. The coroner’s office did supply inferior views of the maxillary palate so that I was able to plot out the width of the mouth, which I confirmed with the infraorbital foramen. The height of the mouth and the shape and height of the mandible were conjecture due to the missing mandible.
The living 2x great grandson advised the family tends to dark hair and eyes, so I went with those for the drawing.
This was a great case to be involved in. I rarely get historical cases, and I enjoyed the opportunity to work with this one.
